Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Léo Favier - The Dark Side of Graphic Deisign

This is the ultimate version of "What I did on my summer vacation..."

Léo Favier is a graphic designer who I met through Charles Freger as Leo and Charles have worked together on several of Charle's books. Léo's newest book, The Dark Side of Graphic Design is loosely bound screen printed(!) 'zine of 48 pages (interlaced with as many pages of text) in which Lèo documents, on the sly, his experience as a graphic design intern at a large Berlin graphic design company.

The idea emerged when his professor for Visual Communications at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin asked the class the practical questions which face everyone studying arts and such, without a clear idea of where to proceed after finishing school:

What are we doing?

How will we live?

To whom will we sell ourselves?

What will we do for money?

What will we become?

These questions led Léo to apply for an internship on "the dark side..", his term for commercialized, and practical side of graphic design, working in an office that produces the daily mundane ads and products that surround us in our daily lives.

His b/w images of still-lives and interiors of the working space are interlaced with a sort of daily diary, documenting the ups and downs, the positive and the negative of what it means to be in the "real-world" of graphic design which in the end isn't nearly as sexy as one might believe, or, as a student, hope.

To produce the book, Léo drove around to printing houses and asked for left-over paper material onto which screen printed the book, the paper varies from book to book and the printing obviously as well through the screen print process, a bit warmer a bit cooler here and there.

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